By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative,in small ways and perhaps large ones..." ~ Benedict Carey, Science section, The New York Times"This packrat has learned that what the next generation will value most is not what we owned but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we loved.In the end, it's the family stories that are worth the storage." ~ Ellen Goodman, (Boston Globe via Deseret News, 4-12-02)"Memory revises itself endlessly." ~ Frank Bruni, Memoirs and Memory (by the author of Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater Families are united more by mutual stories -- of love and pain and adventure -- than by biology. I'd just turned 50 and I assumed it was just age, but I didn't want to get out of bed in the morning and I had the most delicious lie-ins of my life!It was just sheer emotional exhaustion, I now realise.We remember a vivid person, a remark, a sight that was unexpected, an occasion on which we felt something profoundly. We become more exalted in our memories than we actually were, or less so.The interior stories we tell about ourselves rarely agree with the truth.What could there possibly be beyond the happy-go-lucky guy who so effortlessly charms everyone? I mean, ever." And the process has been something of a revelation for Wallace himself."I started out on this project, viewing it as a way to leave something for my children.

Some of the memories maybe wasnt like Id like to have, but I wanted it to be just like it was. I give myself credit for being in this business for so long, he said.

Going Home Again (David Brooks, NY Times, 3-20-14).

"Most of us have an urge, maybe more as we age, to circle back to the past and touch the places and things of childhood. Songs exploded from his head.""If you want to keep a memory as is, you carve it into a story.

All demonstrate the power of the word to salvage from the onrush of life, nuggets worth saving. bonds people together far more than shared chromosomes . And it had a profound effect upon me." ~Mary Caplain, about her experience doing a 40-minute interview with Story Corps (link below)I can't stress enough how different it is to write about the real and the unreal.

~ Tristine Rainer, author of Your Life as Story and Writing the New Autobiography"Do I -- do we -- remember only those scenes that fit neatly into the central narrative in which we're most invested, the one that dovetails most cleanly and neatly with the sense of self that we've chosen or that's been imposed on us by the people around us? When I started writing my memoir my whole metabolism changed.

People do it all the time: they destroy papers; they leave instructions in their wills for letters to be burned." "Bell wrote in 2001, to announce that he had finished the first part of his archive, he said that the obsolescence of software and technology was a threat to a computer archive. I wrote an article called Dear Appy for applications.